Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Get Woke, Go Broke…Leftist School Loses Most Of Its Students

By Professor Doom

When a school, or
any organization, gets taken over by Leftist lunacy, it is called
“convergence,” where all thought now is focused into their belief system. Their
own word for this is “woke,” in other words they are now awake to the “fact”
that everything is RACIST, that gender politicsis everything, that, quite literally, no further action can be taken by
the organization except political acts in support of the ideology.

“Get woke, go
broke,” has been the catchphrase to describe how this works out in the
commercial world. Comics have been converged for some time, and major companies
like DC and
Marvel have seen their sales plummet. Similarly, watching the latest
converged Star Wars movies gives plenty of insight into why the value of that
intellectual property has dropped off so sharply. Or perhaps I could mention how things are
working out for the NFL?

Getting back to
higher ed, we’ve seen the same effect, as converged schools consistently
experience a sharp drop-off in enrollments. It’s a curious thing, as time and
again the followers of this ideology scream at us how what they want is
obviously a great thing…but human beings consistently say they aren’t interested
in the ideology, not in comics, not in movies, not in sports…and not in
education.

Evergreen College
is particularly “woke,” to the point that they have
regular anti-white hate indoctrination/seminars. There was
an estimate a few months ago about how many new students were interested in
this converged school, but the semester’s started, so let’s see how the
estimate matches reality:

"This fall, we expect less than 300 freshmen to attend
Evergreen, a fifty percent drop from two years ago," one Evergreen
professor admitted on the site, Heterodox Academy. "

Much like with
government numbers rarely coming close to reality, Evergreen’s administration
were clearly faking a reality which should have been quite easy to predict
before the semester started.

They lost half
their students!

I feel the need
to highlight the madness here: this school has over 550
administrators; I openly defy the reader to identify any legitimate
business which has more managers than new customers per year, particularly a
business where very few customers continue to be so longer than a handful of
years. Total attendance at this whole school will be around 2800 this year. I
concede Evergreen might be a little top-heavy, but I assure the gentle reader
many schools have far, far, too many admin in relation to the student base.
Every attempt to address this problem so far has involved removing faculty and
cutting faculty pay, and some schools are now considering cutting
faculty pay to zero in an attempt to free up ever more money for
administrative “leadership.”

The fact that this
leadership is, much like at Evergreen, primarily responsible for the immense
decay of our higher education system has so far done nothing to impede their
growth…even as these leaders impede the growth of the student base.

Editors note: A representative for
The Evergreen State college has reached out with an update on anticipated
enrollments. They expect around 350 freshmen to attend in the fall. Also, they
expect 3000- 3100 total full-time enrolled students in 2018 (out of the 4,200
they are funded for). While both of these numbers do represent
significant decreases as compared to before the 2017 unrest, they are marginally
less bleak than Dr. Paros’ estimates, which were based on earlier information.
These are still just estimates,
however. The official enrollments for Fall 2018 will not be determined until
after the 10th day of enrollment.

I politely note
that I don’t have precise numbers and getting those numbers will likely be
problematic but…there is no way to look at the “estimates” given above and not
understand how the leadership there has failed.

Any
repercussions for them? If I lost half my class, admin would come down hard
on me, making me take the blame for it even if it’s admin’s fault they lowered
entrance standards to a ridiculous level. Admin failed here, so surely they’ll
take the blame?

Nope:

An “independent”
External Review Panel exonerated the president and administrators while blaming
Evergreen’s woes on Bret Weinstein and ‘alt-right’ agitators…

Evergreen had a
day on campus where white people were asked to not show up (under strongly
implied penalty of physical harm). Bret Weinstein, very liberal and generally
supportive of identity politics, dared to say “hey, forbidding white people to
come to campus is racist.” Naturally, the leadership there simply removed him
from campus rather than consider any challenge to their ideology.

No, Bret
Weinstein is not responsible for the failure of Evergreen, any more than
alleged “alt-right” agitators.

The “independent”
was in quotes in my above quote because it’s well known all panels and
committees are completely subject to the whims of admin…it’s why they never
take responsibility for any of their mistakes. Any such responsibility would
first need to be assigned by a committee…and admin controls those.

Another short
post as I try to recover from what I hope is the worst of over half a dozen (at
least) surgeries over the last 33 years for what every doctor claims is the
“most curable” cancer around but one last comment:

I make the
following predictions: the failure at Evergreen will simply be repeated at
other campuses. Any primary admin who leave Evergreen (under whatever
circumstances) will land another plum position in higher ed.